Anyone know how does it compares to podman desktop?

I believe Rancher desktop has more of an out-of-the-box focus on Kubernetes, it uses Rancher's k3s and whatnot. Podman desktop treats k8s as more of an optional thing, e.g. you use Kind to create a cluster.

Of course there are also organizational differences, Podman seems to be more of a community led open-source project whereas Rancher is ultimately trying to sell enterprise kubernetes management software.

In my experience, k3s looks great on the surface but I ran into quite a few issues operating it in a single-node use case.

If I was looking into this today, I'd definitely explore Podman/Kind instead.

That’s good info. Thanks!

It's one checkbox to disable k3s, I don't need it as the rare times I need to test something in k8s I do it in the dev environment.

The main rationale for using Rancher is that the CLI is the same as Docker. No modification to any script was needed.

Podman might be better, I can't say, but for what I use it for it doesn't really matter.